


Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now

by decrescendo



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Good Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Panic Attacks, Parental Jim "Chief" Hopper, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 13:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18740194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decrescendo/pseuds/decrescendo
Summary: El doesn’t go to the doctor. That’s a rule, as far as she’s concerned. Not one of theirdon’t-be-stupidrules, because she doesn’t have to follow those anymore, but it’s a rule in her mind because Hop had promised, he’dpromised, and a promise is something you can’t break.But now she’s sitting on the couch with her arm cradled against her chest because ithurtsand he’s sitting on the coffee table, facing her, telling her that they have to go see a doctor.





	Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now

El doesn’t go to the doctor. That’s a rule, as far as she’s concerned. Not one of their _don’t-be-stupid_ rules, because she doesn’t have to follow those anymore, but it’s a rule in her mind because Hop had promised, he’d _promised,_ and a promise is something you can’t break.

But now she’s sitting on the couch with her arm cradled against her chest because it _hurts_ and he’s sitting on the coffee table, facing her, telling her that they have to go see a doctor.

“Look, kid,” he says after she’s told him _no_ for the third time. He does that face, the one where he looks almost-sad and almost-angry, but not angry at her. “Your arm is broken. We have to go get it fixed or it’s not gonna heal right.”

“It’s not broken,” she says. She broke her own wrist once, pounding on the walls of her cell. That was different. It hurt more than this does. She’s already told him this.

Hop scrubs a hand over his face. “It doesn’t always hurt the same, kid.” He’s already said this, too, but she still doesn’t believe him, because if he’s right then she has to go to the doctor, and she cannot do that.

“ _No_ ,” she tells him again. She knows she’s doing one of the bad things they’d talked about, the _raising-your-voice-at-me,_ but she can’t help it.

He doesn’t seem mad, though. Instead he gets off the table and crouches on the floor in front of her, putting one of his big, strong hands on her knee.

“El,” he says softly. He’s using the voice for when she’s sick or she’s had a nightmare, and for some reason it makes her eyes well up with tears. She bites her lip and looks away. “I know you don’t want to, okay? But I can’t fix this at home and your arm can’t stay broken forever. El, hey. Look at me. Look at me.”

He puts his other hand on her cheek and gently turns her face back towards his. Some of the tears have escaped and she knows he can see them, and knows he always gets concerned when she cries, and feels guilty for making him worry.

“It’s gonna be okay. It’s just a regular doctor, okay, nothing like the lab, and I’ll be there with you the whole time.”

Part of her wants to argue with him, but she knows she isn’t going to win, and her arm hurts so much she’s beginning to think it might be worth seeing a doctor to get it fixed. So instead she just sniffles and nods. “Promise?” she whispers.

“I promise.” Hop is looking at her very seriously.

It’s hard to believe Hop’s promises sometimes. He’s lied to her before, like about when he’ll be home and when she can see Mike and, apparently, about never making her go to the doctor. But she also knows that he always _tries_ to keep his promises, and when he says things are going to be okay, they always end up okay. “Okay,” she tells him, and then takes a deep breath, and then before she has time to change her mind about believing him she stands up to get her shoes.

 

—

 

The waiting room doesn’t look anything like the lab so El takes that as a good sign. She stands close to Hop while he talks to the lady behind the desk. She has a photograph of three kids taped to the filing cabinet and all of them are smiling. There weren’t any photographs in the lab and there weren’t any smiles.

The lady hands Hop a clipboard with papers on it and he takes it with a murmured _thanks._ Hop is being polite, which is also a good sign. He never bothers with manners when people are bad or dangerous or untrustworthy. _Untrustworthy_ is when someone is likely to break a promise. That was a word-of-the-day a few months back.

She sits down next to him in one of the chairs that line the walls and watches over his shoulder as he writes on the clipboard. _Jane Eleanor Hopper,_ he writes under _Name._ She smiles a little at that. At the lab, her charts were only labeled with a number.

He gets up to return the clipboard and when he sits down next to her again he puts a hand on her shoulder. “How’re you doing?” he asks quietly.

El’s arm still hurts but she’s pretty sure he means the other stuff. “I’m okay,” she tells him.

He smiles at her. “That’s my girl.”

“Jane Hopper,” says a woman from the doorway.

Hop stands up and so does El. She’s nervous again, but Hop is right next to her and this nurse is wearing blue scrubs, which no one did in the lab. She tries to focus on that.

The nurse stops them in front of a scale. “Shoes off,” she says without looking at El, like she doesn’t really care about what’s happening.

El glances down at her shoes and then at Hop. He seems to understand her question without her saying anything, and crouches down to undo her laces for her so she doesn’t have to use her bad arm. She kicks them off and steps onto the scale.

And everything is so much worse, suddenly. The scale is cold and she can feel it through her socks. Her chest feels tight and she tries to count her breaths, in and out, like Hop taught her. She squeezes her eyes shut.

“Okay, step off,” says the nurse, and El’s eyes snap open again. She steps off the scale and into her shoes and tries to make her face look as normal as possible while Hop ties them for her again. She thinks she’s succeeded, because the nurse doesn’t seem to have noticed anything, but before El can follow her into the examination room Hop stops her with a gentle hand on her good arm.

“Okay?” he asks, voice low so only she can hear.

El is afraid to open her mouth, so she just nods. Hop smiles a little and takes his hand away.

The examination room is small, and it’s crowded with all three of them in there. Hop is stuffed into the corner, towering over the nurse on her little stool, and she keeps looking at him in a way that seems like she wants him to leave. El keeps looking at him, too, but it’s to remind herself that he’s there, he’s right there, and he isn’t going to go anywhere.

“So, what happened here?” asks the nurse, looking down at her clipboard instead of at El.

Hop answers for her. “Fell off her bike,” he says. He doesn’t tell her that El tried to keep herself upright by using her powers and ended up pushing herself too far in the other direction, falling even harder than she probably would have done. That’s called a _lie of omission,_ where you don’t say anything untrue but don’t tell the whole truth, either. El isn’t allowed to do that to Hop (and doesn’t want to) because a lie of omission is still a lie, but it’s okay sometimes, like when it’s part of hiding her powers or her past.

The nurse makes a humming noise and writes on her clipboard. “When was this?”

“This morning,” says Hop. “Ten-ish.”

“Alright.” The nurse sets her clipboard on the table behind her. “I’m gonna take your vitals, and then we’ll get the doctor in.”

And then she lefts the stethoscope from around her neck and puts the ear bits in her ears and holds out the chest bit. El feels herself stiffen. The tightness is there again and she knows it’s stupid, she _knows,_ it’s just a stupid stethoscope, but she can’t stop herself from drawing away.

“Don’t move,” commands the nurse.

El feels Hop’s hand lightly on her shoulder. “Just stay still,” he murmurs quietly to her. “It’ll only take a second.”

She can feel her hands shaking and she tries to take a deep breath. She only manages a shallow one, but it’s better than nothing. She flinches when the stethoscope touches her chest but manages not to pull away again.

But the nurse is frowning. “Her heart rate’s pretty high,” she says.

That makes El panic more, because now she’s doing another bad thing, she’s drawing attention to herself, and Hop has told her a hundred times how hard she has to work to fit in, at least at first. And now Hop is frowning, he’s mad at her, he’s not going to let her go to the movies with Mike this weekend and he’ll stop buying Eggos—

“Doctors make her nervous,” Hop says. And that’s another lie of omission, because El isn’t nervous, she’s _terrified,_ and it’s getting harder and harder to breathe. Hop’s hand is still on her shoulder but it doesn’t feel real, almost like it’s not really her own body he’s touching.

The nurse just blows an irritated-sounding puff of air through her nose and drops the stethoscope. “Can she handle getting her blood pressure taken?”

El doesn’t like the way she says it. It’s nasty and—and— _mocking,_ she decides, after searching for the word. The nurse sounds mocking, like she isn’t really asking because she cares about the answer.

Hop doesn’t seem to like the way she says it either, because he narrows his eyes at her, and El realizes it’s the nurse he’s mad at. He glances at El and she just looks back at him for a moment before she realizes he’s waiting for her permission. She nods. She’ll do her deep breaths and Hop will be _right there_ and then it will be over and they can go home. He turns back to the nurse. “Yes,” he says.

The nurse takes the cuff down from its hook on the wall and El does her best to stay still, even though she can’t help but tense up even further when the nurse straps it around her upper arm. Then the nurse starts inflating it and suddenly El can’t breathe, she _can’t breathe,_ and the strap might as well be fastened around her chest because her lungs are so tight and getting worse with every pump and she _can’t breathe—_

“Stop,” Hop says, and she feels his hand tighten on her shoulder.

The pumping continues and El’s aware that her breaths are coming in loud, ragged, shallow gasps but she can’t stop them, and her head is pounding and she’s dizzy and she squeezes her eyes shut and hears herself whimper, a pathetic sound that she hates.

“I said _stop it,_ ” growls Hop. “Take that thing off my daughter _right now._ ”

El keeps her eyes shut even when she feels the strap being unfastened. She knows where she is. She knows exactly where she is, and Hop’s voice is right there to prove it, but somehow she’s so afraid that if she opens her eyes she’ll see the inside of the lab instead of Hawkins General Hospital.

“Give us a minute,” says Hop.

She hears the nurse huff. “We’re on a schedule, you know,” she says. “There are other patients waiting—”

“Then go see them first, I don’t care,” Hop interrupts. “We’ll wait. But right now, you are going to leave this room and give us a minute of privacy.”

His voice sounds sharp and angry and El waits for the warmth she usually feels when Hop fights for her but instead there’s just the panic clawing at her chest.

She hears the door open and shut and then Hop has a hand on each of her shoulders. “El, can you hear me?”

Mostly she can just hear her own heart pounding in her ears but she can hear Hop too, even though he sounds distorted and far away. She thinks she manages to nod.

“Okay,” he says. His voice is entirely different than it was with the nurse, all soft and low, the nightmare voice. “Take a deep breath with me, okay, kid? In…and out. In…and out.”

She tries to draw in a long breath with him but only manages to inhale for a second before her lungs are contracting, forcing the air back out. “It hurts,” she whimpers.

“I know,” Hop murmurs. “But I need you to keep trying for me, okay? In…and out. In…”

She isn’t sure how long it takes, but eventually she’s breathing again—not as deep as she should be, but enough that she doesn’t think she’s about to faint. The pain isn’t going away, though. Her chest is burning and her throat feels tight, like something is lodged in it, and her head still hurts so badly, almost as much as when she closed the Gate. Maybe more. She reaches out blindly and finds Hop’s arm, and clutches it tightly. “Hop,” she manages.

“I’m right here, sweetheart.”

And then suddenly she feels as if her heart has stopped. He’s never called her that before. She opens her eyes without thinking and the sudden brightness makes her head throb even harder, but she thinks it’s her feelings as much as the pain that causes tears to spill from her eyes. _Overwhelmed,_ her mind supplies helpfully. Another old word of the day.

Hop reaches out and wipes some of the tears from her face with his thumb, and he’s looking at her with so much care, his own eyes a little watery, that she can’t stop the sob that leaves her throat.

He opens his arms to her. “C’mere,” he says softly, and without hesitation she leans into his embrace, winding her good arm around his back and not caring that the broken one is squashed painfully between them. She buries her face in his shoulder and breathes deeply. He smells like cigarettes and sweat and home, and it helps to calm her panic a little, but the tears don’t stop coming.

He wraps one arm around her, holding her tightly, and presses his other hand to the back of her head. “I’ve got you,” he whispers into her hair. He rocks her slightly, making soft hushing noises.

It feels like a long time before she manages to stop crying. Hop seems to notice that she’s gone still because he says, still in that low, quiet voice, “Feel any better?”

She does, a bit, but only because with her eyes closed and Hop holding her it’s easy to pretend they’re not at the hospital. “Wanna go home,” she mumbles into his shirt.

She feels his sigh as much as she hears it. “I know, kid,” he says. “But we still have to get that arm fixed up.”

Her arm. She’d almost forgotten about it. The pain from her broken bone is so much less than the pain from everything else. She doesn’t care if it stays broken forever, she’ll be fine, butshe can’t spend any more time in this place and she really cannot handle being prodded by more doctors. Her chest feels tight again at the thought.

Hop is rubbing her back gently. “Was it anything about that specific nurse? I can ask for a different one.”

El isn’t sure. She had just started panicking, without any conscious reason why. But Hop has been asking her to work on _articulating her feelings_ lately and part of that, he says, is identifying why she’s upset even when she isn’t sure right away. So she thinks about it. “She wasn’t looking at me,” she says eventually, with her face still pressed against his shoulder. “Like at the lab. No one looked at me. When they did the tests.” That isn’t quite true. They looked at her constantly. But they never made _eye contact._ They didn’t look at her like a person. “Like…like I wasn’t even there.”

She feels Hop tense a little the way he always does when she talks about the lab. She used to think it was because he was angry at her, but now she knows it’s because he’s angry at Papa—Brenner—and the bad men.

“And…” She hesitates, trying to find the words. “The…the tools. The scale and the stethoscope and…” She lets herself trail off, knowing that Hop understands. She’s getting better at saying what she means, and he’s getting better at figuring it out even when she doesn’t have the words. Kind of like a compromise.

“Alright,” says Hop, and then puts his hands on her shoulders to push her back a bit, so that they are face to face. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to see if we can get the doctor in here without the nurse finishing your vitals. She was almost done anyway. And then we are going to tell the doctor to do his fastest possible work, okay? And I’ll be right next to you the whole time.”

That doesn’t really sound different than what Hop said earlier. But El just nods miserably. Hop pulls her in for another brief hug and then kisses the top of her head before letting go. “I’m gonna go tell them we’re ready, okay?”

“Okay,” whispers El.

“You can do this,” says Hop. He smiles at her. “I promise.”

 

—

 

El heads for her bedroom as soon as they get home. She doesn’t think she’s ever been so exhausted without having used her powers. But before she reaches the door Hop calls to her from where he’s stopped in the kitchen.

“Come on, kid, don’t I get to sign your cast?”

She turns back to him, confused. “Sign it?”

“Yeah,” he says, and holds up a marker that he’s fished from a drawer. “C’mere.”

She goes back to the kitchen and sits down at the table when he gestures to the seat. He pulls his chair around to sit next to her.

“When people get casts,” he explains, uncapping the marker, “their friends and family sign it. Write their names and sometimes messages and pictures. Like decoration, yeah?”

El smiles a little and holds out her arm to him.

Hop holds onto her wrist gently to keep it still and carefully starts to write. When he pulls back, it says _HOP_ in big, unsteady letters.

“Like that,” he tells her.

She looks down at it for a minute, not speaking. For some reason, seeing his name there makes her chest feel warm and happy. It’s a lot like the feeling she gets when she looks at the birth certificate framed next to the TV, or when she gets to say her full name out loud.

She stretches her arm out to him again. “Add a picture,” she says.

“Of what?"

She thinks for a second before deciding. “Us.”

He smiles at her. He looks _fond,_ she thinks, and that makes her chest feel even warmer.

Hop isn’t a good artist. She knows this already, from all the time she’s requested he draw with her. But she can’t help but beam when Hop pulls back to let her see his picture.

It’s just two stick figures, one with curly hair and one with a beard. The curly-haired one has a checkered circle next to it that it takes El a moment to realize is an Eggo. The bearded oneis wearing boots. Both of them are smiling. And they’re holding hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Starship song of the same name.


End file.
